Simple information site in Sitecore – Part 1: The requirements

This is an article series of 11 parts. It walks you through building a simple information site in Sitecore CMS. This includes everything from installing Sitecore, to defining architecture for the solution, to developing the individual parts. It won’t go into depth to an extent where you will be able to design and develop an enterprise solution, but focuses on giving you a way to create a simple site.

Some of the articles may be targeted different target groups. For instance may the requirements target both editors (to write requirements) and developers. The architecture article may target both architects and developers and so forth.

The requirements

As often is, the clients requirements are based around a set of page types such as the homepage, a news list etc.

The client has asked for the following page types:

Homepage: The home page consists of different types of content spots. The client wants to dynamically add spots to two columns on the homepage. The spots can hold content itself or pull content from documents or similar. After looking through the requirements you find out, there are a need of the following content spots:

An HTML spot: Just consisting of a title, a rich text field, link and a link text.

A teaser spot: This spot references content from another document pulling data from a title, a teaser field and link to the given document

A news list spot: This spot must contain the five latest news and links to these.

An image spot: Which just consist of an image, which are to be shown.

Search page: From this page is it possible to search the contents of the site. The client hasn’t asked for a special search engine, so this is up to us to decide.

News list: This is a list of news displayed in a relational structure. The page uses paging to display more news.

News details page: This page displays a single news in detail including a date for when the news was published.

Document: This is the normal content page just showing a title, an abstract text and the content.

Contact page with a form: This is a typical form sending a mail to a specified address containing the entered message.

Besides these types there are a couple of page elements, which are showed on all pages:

Header with logo: This is the header of all pages. It displays the company logo.

A global menu with links to global pages such as the contact form, the search page and the sitemap. This menu is place in the top right corner.

Left navigation: A typical left menu where all sub pages of the home page are listed. If you click on one the menu items, the menu expands showing the children of that menu item. The menu has up to three levels.

Footer: A simple footer containing a text about copyright and the address.

Breadcrumb: This element is placed on top of the content, and shows the hierarchical path down to the content item the visitor is viewing.

That’s the basic requirements, so you figure this can’t take too long to implement.

Check out the next article where we setup the site and the development environment.

Please rate this article

25 rates / 3,96 avg.

About the author:

Jens Mikkelsen

Jens Mikkelsen is a partner at Inmento Solutions a Sitecore consulting firm. He works as a Sitecore specialist and consulting helping clients architect and build quality Sitecore solutions using the newest modules and tools.

Further he has been deeply envolved in various complex solutions and has built up a strong knowledge of Sitecore architecture and best practices. He has especially focused on and is specialized in debugging and analyzing Sitecore solutions.

Jens is very interested in the technical mechanisms in the new marketing products such as Sitecore DMS and Sitecore ECM.

Jens, I thought you may like this stack unwind that fell into my browser on submitting to your smtp server:

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Net.WebException: The remote name could not be resolved: 'localhost.off'

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.